Easel - a C library for biological sequence analysis

Easel is an ANSI C code library developed by the Eddy/Rivas laboratory at Harvard. Easel supports our work on computational analysis of biological sequences using probabilistic models. Easel is used by HMMER, the profile hidden Markov model software that underlies several protein and DNA sequence family databases such as Pfam, and by Infernal, the profile stochastic context-free grammar software that underlies the Rfam RNA family database. Easel aims to make similar applications more robust and easier to develop, by providing a set of reusable, documented, and well-tested functions.

Easel is not (yet) released on its own. It is part of the HMMER and Infernal releases.

To participate in Easel development, visit us at github.

to build Easel source code from github:

    % git clone https://github.com/EddyRivasLab/easel
    % cd easel
    % autoconf
    % ./configure
    % make
    % make check

This procedure gives you our master branch - the most recent Easel release that was packaged with a release of HMMER, Infernal, or other lab software. If you want a feature that we’ve put in more recently, you want our develop branch. After the git clone and cd easel, do:

   % git checkout develop

and proceed to autoconf.